Salon's Joan Walsh: Race-Baiting Sirota Was Right

Just one day after the Boston Marathon bombing killed three and injured over one hundred people, Salon.com’s David Sirota caused a stir with his article titled: “Let’s hope the Boston Marathon bomber is a white American.” Social media hammered and disgraced Sirota on his post and even started a hilarious #Siroting trend, mocking the writer for the unintended hilarity of his Twitter avatar.

One week later, you’d think Sirota, Salon and those injecting racial politics into the Boston Marathon bombing would have been thoroughly discredited. Enter Salon’s Joan Walsh. As a guest on MSNBC’s “The Cycle” she was grilled by panelist SE Cupp about Sirota’s troubling racial view on the terrorist attack, and Walsh not only defended him, but she proclaimed he was right:

SE CUPP: You both seem to suggest that there is a need for conservatives to pin these kinds of moments on non-whites, but surely – surely, Joan – you have to also admit that there is a need among liberals to pin these kinds of attacks on white right-wingers. Surely, you have to find equal problem with that as well.

Walsh: I don’t know if I find equal problem with it. If it’s a white America, whites are just not profiled the way, you know, the way other groups are. One of our many privileges is we’re just individuals. Those are crazy nuts over there, we don’t have to answer for them.

Walsh went on to claim that, when violent attacks are perpetrated by minorities, there is a, “wave of paranoia, and profiling, and prejudice” that doesn’t happen when whites are responsible. However, she offered no real examples of “waves of paranoia, profiling and prejudice” directed at minority groups after violent attacks like the Boston Bombing. It doesn’t matter, liberal journalists like Walsh and Sirota have just created the myth and it’s somehow become something that “everybody knows.”

Cupp challenged Walsh on her colleague’s irresponsible racial demagoguery, “But the wave of paranoia and prejudice is also fomented on the left by folks like David Sirota.”